The European Union (EU) remains needlessly over-reliant on fossil fuels for transport, thanks in part to policies that discourage the use of sustainable crop-based biofuels to reduce emissions, according to an analysis of European Commission data by the European Renewable Ethanol Association (ePURE).
New figures from Eurostat’s SHARES database show that the share of renewable energy in EU road and rail transport in fact decreased, from 7.5 percent in 2023 to 7.4 percent in 2024, when excluding artificial multipliers for certain renewables that only distort actual progress towards climate goals.
Fossil fuels still accounted for 92.1 percent of transport energy, when considered in real terms, as opposed to 88.5 percent with multipliers.
Meanwhile, the use of crop-based biofuels in transport by Member States is capped under the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) at a level equal to each country’s share of crop-based biofuels in the final energy consumption in road and rail in 2020 + 1 percent, but capped as a maximum of 7 percent.
Even with this cap, crop-based biofuels, including renewable ethanol, are still the main source of renewable energy in transport by far, making up 43.6 percent of the RES-T mix, corresponding to 3.2 percent of total energy in road and rail transport.
Without considering multipliers and biofuels caps, in 2024, only four Member States (Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Austria) are above 10 percent RES-T, the target that should have been fulfilled in 2020 under RED I.
Every year that EU polices unfairly restrain Member States from using sustainable crop-based biofuels to replace fossil fuels is another year lost in the fight for EU energy independence and against climate change, said David Carpintero, Director General of ePURE.
Both Sweden and Finland recorded significant drops in their RES-T compared to 2023, from 29.9 percent and 16.8 percent, respectively.
The Netherlands’ real RES-T rose from 8.5 percent to 13.2 percent between 2023 and 2024, while most other Member States have made little progress in this regard compared to previous years.
With conflict in the Middle East making Europe’s reliance on imported fossil fuel even more unsustainable, there is an urgent need to favour renewables that actually make a difference in the fight against climate change: this includes European renewable ethanol, ended David Carpintero.
